Mir Developer Pleads The Case "Why Mir"

Canonical developer Alan Griffiths has been blogging a lot in recent days about the Mir display server. He's been trying to get the community to support Mir and even potentially add native Wayland client support. His latest post is entitled "Why Mir" with many still wondering why they should care about Mir when Wayland has proven to be the tested and widely-adopted path forward.

Griffiths talks up Mir's abstractions, Mir's support for Mesa KMS/X11 and Android HWC graphics (though they too are all capable with Wayland), "beyond proof of concept" Vulkan support even though that isn't public yet and Wayland Vulkan support is, and Mir as a display server provides "sensible defaults."

Because the work has been funded by Canonical features that were important to Ubuntu Phone and Unity8 desktop have progressed faster and are more complete than others.

When Mir was started we needed a mechanism for client-server communications (and Wayland wasn’t in the state it is today). We did something that worked well enough (libmirclient) and, because it’s just a small, intentionally isolated part of the whole, we could change later. We never imagined what a “big deal” that decision would become.

Those wanting to read more can see Why Mir. But in extensively monitoring the Linux graphics landscape, about the only selling point I see is its sensible defaults in making it easier for developers to get up new shells going on Mir quickly but we've already seen that bringing up Wayland compositors can be widely done and more work has been done (and still on going) within the different Wayland camps to allow for more code sharing. One of the big issues meanwhile for Mir is that its XMir and Mesa driver support isn't mainline and thus not readily available outside of Ubuntu packages.